During the period between 1949 and 2008, a 1 percent increase in congressional seats held by Republicans (about five seats), has resulted in the top 1 percent of American households seeing their share of the nation's income go up by about four-fifths of a percent, regardless of which party occupied the White House. That translates into about $6.6 billion in 2008 dollars being redistributed upward to those at the top.

That's according to a new study co-authored by Thomas Volscho, a sociologist at the City University of New York, and Nathan Kelly, a political scientist at the University of Tennessee. The study appears in the October issue of American Sociological Review , which looks at the rise of the super-rich in the United States.